It would have been a miracle if Marianas Trench lead singer Josh Ramsay hadn't gone into music.

His father, Miles Ramsay, was a jingle writer-producer and one of the founders of Vancouver's legendary Little Mountain Sound Studios -- home to such talented producers as Bob Rock and Bruce Fairbairn, who worked on albums by the likes of Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, AC/DC, Metallica, Bryan Adams, and Mötley Crüe.

Eventually it was sold in the mid-'90s and divided into a rehearsal space and The Factory studio. The latter has been closed since last year, but Ramsay has a master plan.

"I would like to buy it back and restore it and get it back to what it was," said Ramsay, 26, down the line from Vancouver before his pop-punk outfit begin a cross-Canada arena tour Thursday night opening for Montreal band Simple Plan.

"The cool thing is that all that magic is still there. You just need to remove a couple of things to get back to it."

Meanwhile, his mother, Corlynn Hanney, was a singing teacher and background singer for Leonard Cohen.

"I was just exposed to so many musicians growing up. Everyone in my family was a musician. Everybody that they knew was a musician, so until I was like 12 I thought everybody WAS a musician. It seemed like a really realistic career path because that was what everybody did. And I had never seen people who were not successful doing it. So I was just like, 'Okay, well, that's what I'm doing.' "

Needless to say, he grew up hearing some great rock 'n' roll stories.

"The funny thing about my mom is that she'll say these things in passing, 'cause she's a fairly humble person," said Ramsay. "There are stories of her smoking weed with Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan or watching Jimi Hendrix burn his guitar at the side of the stage. She has all of these weird, crazy stories, that she just sort of forgets that that's a big deal. Like she was there when they were recording the piano for Bridge Over Troubled Water (in L.A.). But she doesn't bring that stuff up."

Despite his success now -- he has his own recording studio and also writes and produces for other Canadian artists (Danny Fernandes, Carly Rae Jepsen) -- there were some early major challenges along the way as Ramsay battled depression, bulimia and anorexia and heroin addiction in high school.

Ramsay says Marianas Trench's latest and third album, 2011's Ever After, was inspired by the common modern fairytale theme of "a character from the real world ending up in a fantastical place and then loving it and then trying how to figure out how to get home."

"I guess that kind of spoke to me as someone who's been like really ambitious my whole life and looking for things," said Ramsay. "It sort of appealed to my 'grass is always greener' mentality, I guess, and then I was also thinking, too, that it would be cool to have an album that had a story from start to finish."

Ever After, which is one continuous piece of music with no breaks between songs and has an accompanying storybook in the liner notes, received a Juno Award nomination this week for Pop Album of the Year. It also gave the Vancouver band their highest album chart debut late last year at No. 8 in Canada, and went gold its first week.

The latest tour, which Ramsay hopes will be followed by an actual Ever After trek featuring the album from start to finish, is ambitious for a number of reasons.

"It's the first time we've played some of these songs and our new material from the new album is very ambitious in and of itself so it's a lot of work that way," he said. "Like the singing is very difficult for me and the other band members and just the songs are much more difficult. Plus this is the first tour where we're doing a little bit more complex staging with props and technical things."

Still, Ramsay promises he won't be in any goofy suits.

"There's no suits of armour on me. (But) there's a lot of fairytale ambiance for sure."

Ramsay’s jokes bomb in South Korea

Vancouver pop-punk band Marianas Trench just returned from their first ever trip to Seoul, South Korea.

Frontman Josh Ramsay said the crowds were receptive even if his jokes went over like a dead balloon.

"There's a few challenges. Part of the Marianas stage show is me sort of improv bantering with the audience and that's a little tougher to do when you have a language barrier," he said.

"So I learned how to say a few things in Korean to say on stage but it wasn't like I was telling amusing anecdotes or anything. And I'd say the most challenging thing to me was doing a couple of interviews like TV interviews like where you'd have to use a translator. That's a little tough because you can't really say anything funny because a lot of that kind of thing is in delivery which of course is lost in translation ... I couldn't do my schtick as easily."

Ramsay actually did improv as a younger man and is still interested in acting, it turns out.

"It was very 50-50," he said on pursuing acting versus music. "And you know what? I still am 50-50. It's just that things worked out (in music). But it doesn't mean I ever lost interest in the other half."